The recent news articles reporting that 90% of Oxycontin doses prescribed nationwide were dispensed in the state of Florida may help put the following post, found on a pharmacy web site, into perspective. Reading between the lines (admittedly, sometimes a dangerous thing to do), there may be something even bigger in the works than the major (a big deal was made over one of the closed practices that had been clearing $150K/day) drug mill arrests in the state of Florida over the last several weeks.
Exactly? What that Purdue reps are the lowest form of scum in pharma. You sold/sell a drug where 60-75% goes on the street. It is a fact. Just keep convincing yourselves of "all the cancer patients" you are helping. It's a joke. That is why your co gets sued daily. Little drug dealers running around with a hotspot in Florida. Florida reps should stare in mirror at least 10 minutes a day and realize they are killing families all over the state. Must feel good going to work being a "pharma rep". Try Teva, they will laugh in your face you brainwashed drug pushers
Genus Spliced, people!!!!
There are 49 other states in which there weren't doctors making $150K a day off this drug.
Many in which Oxycontin had to be prescribed on triplicate forms that physicians had to pay a dollar apiece to their states for, such that said states had a copy of every single prescription that was written. It was illegal in many states to replace triplicate prescriptions that were "lost" or "stolen" after delivery to the patient. Even if they really were lost or stolen, the best physicians could do for their patients in those circumstances was to help ease the patient's withdrawal symtoms.
Florida's getting so horribly infested was not just due to some lucky Purdue reps. Florida's lawmakers have to take a large part of the responsibility. Perhaps all these people talking about filing a class action or or mass tort action against Purdue might instead find it is more productive to retarget their sights squarely at Florida's elected representatives.
One of the tricks that Purdue's lawyers use involves the use of amicus briefs designed to get the judge to side with them on the idea that
their state should not become known as a litigation magnet state which takes the brunt and costs of actions, the majority of the members of which are from from 49 other states, and most not from the state in which the action is taking place. The problem with that argument is that it can be applied in any state in which a case could eventually reach fruition. It's a clever trick that stops the lawsuits right in their tracks. And the judges either don't, or don't want to, see the consequences.
Now, if a state, or it's representatives, become the
target of the suit, rather than just it's venue, it becomes a whole 'nother ball of wax.
As a matter of pure speculation (and, of course, there are any number of other, totally different, ways in which this could be handled), it might be possible to show that certain lawmakers who resisted the idea of using triplicate forms in Florida were conspirators in a massive fraud on the American people, involving the cultivation of drug addicts for profit, with certain conspirators acting as lobbyists aiding and abetting a ruse that resulted in the replacement of a time tested drug with a poorly designed drug, with consequences that not only could be reasonably anticipated, but which were in fact explicitly expressed as worrisome concerns in the minutes of the FDA panel that met to vote on the oxycontin reformulation . It might be speculated, or otherwise considered, that agents of Purdue Pharma LP, acting as co-conspirators, encouraged some FDA panelists to misinterpret data, described by some sympathetic parties as "damning, if only they had been correctly interpreted", from eight open label phase one studies (in which only healthy opiate naive subjects subjects were administered huge oxycodone doses while putatively having also been administered an opioid antagonist) that were used as a major portion of the basis of an FDA decision that became a critical fulcrum in the matter, illnesses on a massive scale.
It should be noted that while some are laughing at the situation in Florida, there are others who take a vital interest in matters that were precipitated in large part by that situation, and who are dealing only in facts, not in speculation.
It seems to me that "resulting in illnesses on a massive scale" is itself speculation. I haven't seen any proof that the reformulated drug causes any lasting harm, although the pre-approval testing methodology was horrid, and the data obtained failed to prove the opposite, that the new drug would be either safe or effective.
Seriously though, the pt was clearly having signs of W/D, as have others on the same medication.
